She'd rather interview people like Jim Wyckoff (who is calling a US market top and is therefore an idiot), James Turk (who says there's no US economic recovery and is therefore either wilfully blind to economic data or too incompetent to interpret it), and Greg Weldon (who says the Federal Reserve don't know what they're doing, which makes you wonder why Greg Weldon is a lowly commodity trader getting interviewed on YouTube while Janet Yellen is running the largest central bank in the history of the world).

So we're stuck with watching Alex Letourneau interviewing the Cookie Monster, which I guess is okay if you're a chick and you find these two guys attractive. Or, hey, maybe also if you're gay, NTTAWWT.

But neither of them rock my world so I didn't really pay attention much.

Cookie's optimistic about 2014, which is good considering he called the top in paper back in 2011.

He's not all-knowing, cos he still doesn't have a good explanation for China; but he still makes me want to go and stack more phyzz.

Gold and the miners are acting like people were positioned for a good jobs report that didn't happen.

Now, just so you know, Google has fucked up blogger so I can't post charts; NoScript is flagging it as a cross-site scripting attempt, and I trust NoScript way more than I trust Google. And I'm not going to fire up Internet Exploder to post, and I already uninstalled Chrome and am never touching it again.

But you can look at the charts yourself and see that GDXJ and GLD are both threatening the SMA(50).

BTO is already moving up from a successful test of support at its own SMA(50).

Thursday, January 9, 2014

B2Clive has been slowly flagging up. It's made two attempts to break above the SMA(50), printing a higher low on each fallback. It's not a company run by morons, and last I checked Namibia and Nicaragua aren't at war with each other (though unfortunately there's that whole Philippines thing).

So is this price the right price for an entry? Apparently, some TAs say that the longer a flag goes up, the more likely it is that it fails downwards. And besides, the bias in gold miners has been downwards for the past several years. Why buy a downward market? Buying Spain is less risk right now.

I guess it all depends on what you think the juniors are going to do this month:

That little challenge of the SMA(50) is positive, all we're seeing so far is a pullback to the EMA(16), and India's about to announce some improvements to their gold import rules.

Then again, the longer-term chart for gold still looks like puke. Gold could still fail.

Then again then again, that longer-term chart looking like puke is the justification everyone's using for expecting gold to collapse to $1000 and below, which I still think is silly, and which ain't going to happen simply because everyone's now expecting it, but yet there's very little profit-to-risk in it compared to say the short of gold at $1500 that ended up working so well.

Tuesday, January 7, 2014

If you think you've got problems, yesterday Winnipeg was colder than Mars. Literally. The Mars Rover recorded a higher temperature than Winnipeg.

So quit your whining.

Now here's some morning news:

BI - every new Fed chair faces a test. This is funny. Every single time a new Fed Chair has been inaugurated, gold outperformed stocks. For at least 2-3 months, according to the chart. Now, insufficient sample size and all, and I don't see a fundamental reason for it; but even still it should give goldbugs hope, no?

Reuters - India considers easing gold import curbs. The usefulness of this article depends entirely on whether Manoj Kumar really does have any contact with "government sources", or whether he just took a bribe from JP Morgan to run the article. We'll see within the month, apparently:

The decision to cut the import duty is likely to be taken anytime this month, said one of the government sources, who has direct knowledge of the deliberations but did not want to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue.

So why would the government be changing their tune? Well, #1 the Congress Party are incompetent morons, but here's reason #2:

Jewellers, who estimate India's monthly demand to be nearer 60 tonnes, have been asking for a duty cut to 8 percent and have the backing of the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, which is leading in state polls ahead of national elections due this year.

Erm, toldyaso?

der Spargel - racist Germans wish to ban "poverty immigration". By "poverty immigration" the article means the free movement of people within the European Union to find the best market for their labour, and by "racist Germans" we mean mainstream Germans, especially that nation's bastion of Nazism the CSU. Again, yet more proof that Germans only want to be part of the EU if they win and everyone else loses.

Monday, January 6, 2014

Bespoke - earnings season cometh. It starts on Thursday with Alcoa. I guess that's why everyone is selling right now?

FT Alphaville - on China debt. On the one hand, yes that chart for 10Y BBB+ corporates looks scary. But on the other, Bill Bishop at Sinocism says "good luck to those betting on a debt crisis"; apparently it's just people getting worked up over nothing again. I'll take Bishop for now.

So there's a company called Wajam that illegally gains access to your computer and illegally takes your system resources away from you and illegally redirects your browser and shit.

I say "illegally" because if you're installing your shit on my computer and doing shit without an explicit and informed check-off from me, you're stealing my computer resources.

I dunno how I came across it; it might be that I caught it from clicking on a "sponsored" link to download Chrome instead of the proper link. (I backtracked when I saw it was the wrong site, but even loading the site might have been enough.) It could have come bundled with Chrome. I could have caught it as a "drive-by download" in an ad, as well, since I did run Chrome and Internet Exploder for a little bit last night.

Typically I use Firefox with several security add-ons, so you can't drive-by me; but unfortunately I trusted a company that I wasn't supposed to trust, enough to go to their site in Exploder, and I suspect that's how I got infected.

But in any case, I saw my computer was doing things it wasn't supposed to: it was chugging on the hard-drive when it should have been idle, and it was using system resources that it wasn't supposed to be using.

First thing I do is fire up Wireshark and look for data transfers that ain't supposed to be there. Not really useful in many cases, but a protocol analyzer saved me from the port 135 worm years ago, so it's second nature for me to watch my traffic. Anyway, I saw nothing of value there.

I decided for the heck of it all to run Malwarebytes, and lo and behold it found "PUP.(something).Wajam.A".

So I looked Wajam up, saw how nasty it was, and went searching for a removal method.

This site here, malwaretips.com, has a step-by-step method for uninstalling Wajam, which involves downloading and installing some stuff but which otherwise worked fine, considering Wajam is fuckingbitchcuntware that is almost impossible to uninstall.

And yeah, the people who run the Wajam site supposedly have an uninstaller available; but you can't get to it on their site without enabling javascript (which I don't do, see "internet security" above), and in any case why am I going to trust the fuckheads who just infected my computer?

So I went through the malwaretips.com method, and now I'm presently running AVG to make sure Wajam is gone. I'm assuming Wajam hasn't paid off AVG to not detect them as a virus.

Problem is, my computer was still chugging a bit when wasn't supposed to. Seriously, I cut my teeth on Win95/98, so I'm the type of person who doesn't want my computer doing anything without my explicit say-so. Computers are supposed to stand still til you tell them to move.

So I went into Task Damager, and saw a few processes still using my fucking CPU. Did a search, and it turns out they're both related to Windows disk indexing.

Maybe disk indexing gets turned on by Wajam? I don't know. It certainly fucks up your whole registry. Anyway, I went into Admin Tools/Services/ and killed that Windows disk indexing bitch too. Not needed, so go away.

Point being, you'll look on the internet for how to kill Wajam, and it's a really crafty bitch that is hard to get off your system. But you might want to look at your computer in detail afterwards to see if it's changed your settings to make your computer slow down even after you get rid of it.

It might still be, of course, that my disk churn is actually being caused by a Cryptolocker process slowly killing my data. I'm not sure. So if I disappear off the net for a few days, it's because I'm doing a nuke and trying to work within Linux.

B2Clive has actually pretty much refused to wake up to the extent of some other gold miners. Til today, really, where it retakes the SMA(50). I wonder how far it can run if it prints a higher high this week?

And gold is looking perky, and possibly might retake its own SMA(50). That will really confuse the market if it happens, won't it? After all, isn't gold supposed to suck?

I'm starting to think the action from late-November on was panic selling to get gold & friends out over everyone's portfolios by end of year. This would mean gold has a way to go still before it even retakes the equilibrium price that it was so vigourously pushed away from.

And yeah, for what it's worth I don't think we'll be seeing sub-$1150 gold this year. Unless, of course, there is a massive wave of gold selling due to a China debt collapse, of course.

Sunday, January 5, 2014

Reformed Borker (Bork Bork Bork!) - on the outlook for 2014. I doubt we'll get his "1994", where stocks go nowhere. Why? Fed funds rate went up 300 points in 1994 to drive the PE compression. Can't happen in 2014. I also don't think there'll be a >10% correction, unless it's cos of China.